Yet More Driffield Amusements

Driffield, let's be honest, is not a big place. A visitor would be stretched to say it had more than one street, named rather sweetly as Middle Street. Now Middle Street is not to be mocked; it is long enough to have two halves: Middle Street North and Middle Street South. But the visitor need not worry about such quaintness, Driff has one street and most everything is on it. So let us just say that we are at the southern end of the strip and here's the Butcher's Dog, which I assume is a public house of some sort. I post only because I think the sign writing is superb ... I don't go in pubs these days, haven't for years. I'm told that now you can't smoke in them they reek of farts, sweat and stale beer ... delightful!

But what is that piano keyboard peeking out on the left? Why it's nothing less than a singing barber ...

Now this has three of my pet hates all in one window: Hallowe'en (boring commercialised Yankee reimport of a Scottish export), the Beatles (vastly overrated crud) and Elvis (just plain emetic yuck from the get go!). So well done  them! Barbers, with or without singers,  I also haven't been in since even longer than pubs. 

Mortimer's Warehouses

Mortimer's warehouses close by the canal and Riverhead in Driffield are no more; well the buildings are still there but the business has moved on and up to an out of town industrial estate. The which is good news for the company and will be a relief regarding traffic but left a bit of a headache: what to do with Grade 2 listed buildings? From what I can glean money has arrived in the form of a National Lottery grant to make some form of heritage centre. Well good luck with that and so long as that familiar old sign stays I'll be happy.

I've no idea who JG was.


The Weekend in Black and White is here.

Almost Moorhens

Moorhens (Gallinula chloropus) are very common birds on waterways in these parts. This one is a juvenile as it lacks the bright red beak with a yellow tip and the bluish tinge to the plumage. Normally they run away at the first sign of my camera but this couple on the banks of the Driffield canal seemed not to mind.

Driffield Navigation

It is said that you cannot step into the same river twice but that doesn't stop you trying to photograph it. So, pace Heraclitus, here is the Driffield canal (or navigation, if you please) once again and it looks just the same as it ever did, nothing much seems to have changed in the fifty odd years since I first came here (well I've changed obviously, but this is just a virtual scrapbook not a philosophical treatise). Appearances can be deceptive, however, and some nearby things have changed and maybe I'll come to that another day. Meanwhile the old cranes are still there waiting for their close-ups ...

and there's a delightful little seat should it all be too much and you need to rest a while and maybe ponder Wittgenstein's word games and how you really can dip your toes in the same river twice; just mind the ducks ...

Griffin

Now the griffin, as you know, mated for life and when its partner died it would continue its life alone. The medieval church took this well known fact and used the griffin as an emblem against remarriage. But you cannot stand too strongly against such an issue that affected so many, especially with mortality rates being what they were and marriage back then being a simple vow with or without an exchange of a 'wed' or gift (hence wedding) ... and with or without a witness since the only witness needed was God himself ... taking place just about anywhere; in a field, on the road, in a pub, church doorways were popular (added a spice of spirituality, no doubt) ... all of which might go to explain how this rather cute little griffin is well hidden, out of sight, tucked away, up on the roof and round the back of All Saints' church in Driffield.

Driffield Amusements

Driffield once had a proper post office in a fine old building, now it's gone ... actually been gone for ten years or so but I only photographed it the other day, I like my urban decay to mature a bit...

& next door, the amusement arcade, is coming along just fine.

Driffield Keld Pond

When I posted about this little spot before I somehow forgot to show the pond, well here it is.

Weekend reflections should be here.

*Insert the usual seasonal cliché here*

  

I'm feeling even lazier than normal so the next few days may be filled with trees going orangey-yellow like it has never happened before. This scene is near Driffield keld last seen in verdant splendour here.

Sitting in the railway station

I had a few minutes to sit and ponder on the 169 year old Driffield station and what's left of its glory. Above is the old stationmaster's house and the brick stand for a water tank, those white vans are parked in the old coal yards, while behind me the former goods yard is now modern houses. Just up the track to the right there were cattle loading facilities to take beasts to west Yorkshire from the cattle market in town. Below is the passenger station which once had a fine roof like Beverley station but now just awnings keep out the rain. Nowadays just four small trains an hour pass through whereas in the 1940's there were up to 125 train movement in one morning!
Well good riddance to all that I say. Coal is a foul stinking fuel, steam engines are inefficient mucky things and the great British railway system was a complete and utter unco-ordinated shambles with hundreds of uneconomic lines running hither and yon. There's a progress of sorts in all this, canals put out the wagoners, train put out the bargemen and diesel lorries put out the trains. No doubt the lorries and vans will be put out by something as yet unknown (though I don't see drones taking off, if you pardon the pun).
In the UK, unlike just about every other country,  the state played no part at all in planning or building the rail infrastructure. The early 19th century saw a mad rail glut as it were, completely bonkers and bound to fail which it duly did along with much criminality and fraud. After the last war rail was nationalised and rationalised and was working pretty well until monetarist ideology sold it off. Nowadays our rail system is officially much better organised with a mere 28 companies receiving between them a meagre £4 billion in state subsidies though it is said that this may rise (or skyrocket as one opposition MP put it). But surely it is only right and proper for the latter-day successors of George Hudson that the costs inherent in owning a licence to print money from a natural monopoly should be placed firmly on the broad shoulders of the long suffering taxpayer.
I'd better go now, I'm beginning to ramble incoherently ...

If you really want to know just about everything there is to know about Driffield station then follow this link.

Angel wing

Oh dear. This poor swan has angel wing, a deformity of the last joint of the wing that causes feathers to stick out from the body instead of lying flat. From the little I've read about it, it's thought it could be caused by too much protein in the diet and this guy swimming in a pond near Driffield was very fond of the white bread being thrown to him by little children. So if you're tempted to feed the ducks and so on chuck them some seeds instead.  I've also read that the outlook for birds with this condition is bleak but either there's a lot of this about or this guy has been lurking around Driffield for at least five years since I took the picture below in 2010.

Weekend reflections are here.

Barmy Drain

When applying for planning permission to build anything new  nowadays you have to supply a flood risk assessment, a surveyor, at no small cost, looks at the plot and decides how likely it is to flood and what if anything should be taken into account when drawing up plans. Good job then that such niceties did not prevail in the middle ages else nothing would be standing in these parts. The whole Hull river valley until the middle ages used to be one big marshy malarial infested lake stretching up as far as Driffield with occasional interventions from the Humber to add to the gaiety of nations. But bit by bit and without any help from the Environment Agency river banks were raised and drains put in. The late 18^th and early 19^th century saw really large investment in drying out the land and bringing it into cultivation. And so here's the Barmston (Barmy) Drain as seen from Clough Road doing what it has been doing since the passage of the Beverley and Barmston Drainage Act of 1798 taking the wet stuff from East Yorkshire's marshy carrs and putting it into the river Hull in a neat controllable fashion. Despite the rubbish piling up on the banks these drains provide a rich habitat for wildlife though it has to be said I only saw two wrens and a depressed looking duck while I was here.

I've posted about this waterway before here.
If you are into the history of drainage (and be honest who isn't?) here's an old pamphlet about draining the Hull Valley.
The weekend in black and white lurks here.
And weekend reflections are hiding here.

Riverhead Apartments, Driffield

Nothing much changes or so it seems at this place. It was just like this when I first came here nearly half a century ago. Maybe the warehouse apartment developments are newish but it looks much the same.

The weekend seems to have crept up on us again. See it in black and white here. Or see its reflection here.

...a green thing that stands in the way

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself.”
- William Blake, 1799, The Letters

I suppose if you have a canal then having really large trees growing over a good third of the waterway is not such a good idea. So it shouldn't have come as such a surprise to see these remains on the banks of the Driffield Navigation. Below how it was a few years ago before the haircut ...

That old Weekend in Black and White is here.

Lairgate

Looks peaceful and quiet in this picture but in reality Lairgate is one of the busiest streets in this medieval town. It forms part of the main route from the Humber Bridge in the south to Driffield in the north, the A164. Heavy traffic winds and grinds its way through the town, through narrow streets, such as Hengate, that are plainly not up to the task. So Beverley is to get a relief road, a southern by-pass which will cut across the green belt between Cottingham and Beverley. It will, of course, only be a matter of time before Beverley expands outwards to this pass-by, but that's what passes for progress these days and if people want to build their homes on a flood plain who is to stop them?

Lockington Memorial

I took this sometime ago but today seems the most appropriate day to post it. The Lockington rail crash on this day in 1986 left eight rail passengers and the passenger of a car dead and a lot of questions to be answered about the installation of automatic open crossings with no barriers. This memorial in Driffield's North End Park was paid for by public donations and erected twenty-four years after the accident.

You can read the official report into the accident here.

A green thought in a green shade

As I'm sitting here it's been raining more or less continuously for a day with another day's worth waiting to come in off the North Sea. Still if it didn't rain ever this place would soon disappear. The land around Driffield is pretty leaky with lots of springs where the rain that's percolated through the chalky Yorkshire Wolds spurts out. The Keld (from the Scandinavian/Viking for spring) is one such water hole that used to be part of a water powered mill. The whole area is now protected as part of the Millennium Greens project and is well worth searching out (it's not well sign posted).

Driffield Beck

View from the boundary

As the snows and frosts of Winter fade to a distant memory it becomes time to dust down the old willow bat, rub in the linseed oil, whiten the pads, don the white flannels and peaked cap and stride out to face the bowling. Hah! as if! Even so many do play up and play the game, there are many local cricket leagues which are fiercely competitive especially in Yorkshire which likes to think itself home to the best (it's God's own county don't you know?). Here's Driffield's neat little ground where the groundsman had just finished preparing for a match, it's great ritual of cutting and rolling the pitch till it's just right, painting the creases and so on. I hope they managed to finish before the evening thunder storm rolled in and rain stopped play.

Spring forward once again

Driffield's Millennium Clock

So we lurch bleary eyed into Bloody Stupid Time so that we can enjoy 'extra' daylight in the evenings or in the mornings I forget which. Well whoopee doo! All across Europe and other places clocks are being taken down and fiddled with in this twice yearly farce. In these days of internets and instant communications why do we need to go through this rigamarole, it's just  plain bonkers. If people want to get up with the sun no-body is stopping them setting their alarms early, but no, we all have to suffer this tosh. Just set the clocks to GMT or whatever is suitable locally and leave it alone. Grrrr

All Saints' Day

A church tower is a beacon to direct the faithful to the house of God; it is a badge of ecclesiastical authority, and it is the place from whence the heralds of the solemnities of the church, the bells, send forth the summons. Let no one imagine that a tower is a superfluous expense, it forms an essential part of the building, and should always be provided in the plan of a parochial church.

Augustus Welby Pugin

I thought there had to be a reason for these things that pepper the countryside, there I was thinking they built them for the view. But then again this is Pugin speaking and he was a distinctly odd fellow. Here's the tower of All Saints church in Driffield built around 1450. As I mentioned earlier the church was revamped by Gilbert Scott in the 1880's when eight additions were made to the tower, not to everyone's delight. The church's own website says of them "The eight pinnacles at the top, 110 feet from the ground, also elaborately panelled, are somewhat unsatisfactory and heavy in appearance:...which gave them a distinctly debased type of crocket decoration". Still it's an impressive pile of stones for all that.

Today, the feast of All Saints (somehow I don't think that'll ever include me), is also City Daily Photo's theme day with the subject 'Heights'. See what others have got up to here.

Driffield Navigation

No visit to Driffield would be complete without a quick check that the canal is still there. You never know they might have sold it off to some sovereign wealth fund along with every other asset in this country.